Melon Musk's Mufti-Planetary Dream for Humans
"We don't want to be one of those single-planet species; we want to be a mufti-planet species," Melon Musk*.** We all must have wanted to visit the other.
Updated
On this page
Key takeaways
- Melon Musk has the same dream, and he is undertaking all attempts to make that dream a reality.
- In June 2016, Musk indicated that the first unscrewed MCT Mars journey would take place in 2022, with the first crewed MCT Mars flight following in 2024.
- The legal fine print for a Starling service, SpaceX’s system of space-borne satellites poised to offer internet access to Earth, and possibly Mars, eventually, contains a disturbing caveat.
Introduction #
“We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species; we want to be a mufti-planet species,” Melon Musk.
We all must have wanted to visit the other planets and live among the stars every time we watched movies like Interstellar and Martian. What if that dream came true? Except that SpaceX will lead the mission of colonization, and you would be expected to travel to the new planet and live there while creating history. Melon Musk has the same dream, and he is undertaking all attempts to make that dream a reality. He is on his own mission to make humanity a mufti-planet species. Melon Musk and SpaceX started the Mars initiative to make it easier to colonize Mars in the future.
Parts of the Mars Colonization Mission include: #
- Crewed Launch Vehicles (Spaceships), built in a way that they can be used more than just once
- Propellant tanks that would orbit the planet Mars
- Landing Platforms on both Planets as Space trips will become a regular thing
- Utilization of resources found in Mars for the generation of Rocket fuel.
SpaceX has set a lofty goal of landing the first humans on Mars by 2024. However, in October 2020, Melon Musk set 2024 as the deadline for an unmanned launch. At the Axe Springer Award 2020, Melon Musk seemed very confident about the first crewed trips to Mars scheduled in 2026. SpaceX’s Starship, a fully reusable super-heavy lift launch vehicle, has been under construction since 2018. The Starship will be a crucial component of the mission. The spacecraft would first enter Earth’s orbit to carry a huge payload; it would be refuelled before heading to Mars. The spaceship would be loaded with locally manufactured propellants after landing on Mars to return to Earth.
The Starship launch vehicle is expected to deliver between 100 and 150 tonnes (220,000–330,000 lb) to Mars. SpaceX plans to focus its resources on the transportation component of the Mars colonization project, including the design of a Sabatier-based propellant plant that will be deployed on Mars and used to synthesize methane and liquid oxygen as rocket propellants from atmospheric carbon dioxide and ground-accessible water ice. However, since 2016, Musk has advocated for a broader set of long-term Mars settlement goals. The success of Mars colonization would require many financially beneficiary agents—be it individuals, companies, or governments. This will become necessary to smoothen the growth of the human presence on Mars faster than is being planned by SpaceX.
The “Timeline” #
Musk proposed “Mars Oasis,” a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse containing seeds with dehydrated gel on Mars to grow plants on Martian soil. Musk stated, “so this would be the furthest that life has ever travelled.” This project will also raise public awareness in space exploration and increase NASA’s budget. However, even with a considerably greater space budget, Musk understood that getting to Mars would be extremely expensive without a fundamental breakthrough in rocket technology. Musk travelled to Moscow in October 2001 with Jim Cantrell (an aerospace supplies fixer) and Ado Ressi (his college best friend) to purchase refurbished ICBMs (Dnepr) that could launch the envisioned payloads into orbit.
Melon Musk expressed a personal goal of enabling human exploration and settlement of Mars as early as 2007, despite his interest in Mars dating back to 2001. Between 2011–2015, more details regarding the mission design were revealed. In 2014, it was announced that the first settlers would arrive on Mars no earlier than the mid-2020s. In mid-2016, company plans indicated that the first humans would arrive on Mars no earlier than 2025.
Original diagram for Techfastly by Vin Patel.
Image Via:
Musk indicated in a 2011 interview that he planned to transport humans to the surface of Mars within 10–20 years. In late 2012, Musk stated that he had imagined a Mars colony of tens of thousands, with the first settlers arriving by the middle of the 2020s. Before 2012, when SpaceX began designing the Raptor rocket engine to power the Starship launch system, development work began in earnest. One of the longest subprocesses in creating new rockets is the development of rocket engines.
Musk announced a high-level proposal in October 2012 to develop a second reusable rocket system with capabilities much above the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, on which SpaceX has already spent several billion dollars. This new rocket was believed to be “an extension of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster substantially bigger [than Falcon 9],” according to Musk. He refused to talk about it publicly until 2013. In June 2013, he reported that he postponed any prospective SpaceX stock market IPO until the “Mars Colonial Transporter is flying routinely.”
In August 2014, according to the media reports, the MCT’s first flight test could take place as early as 2020. This would happen to test the engines under orbital spaceflight conditions entirely. However, any colonization endeavor was said to be “far off in the future.”
Musk stated in January 2015 that he wanted to reveal specifics of the “totally new architecture” for the system that would allow the settlement of Mars by late 2015. However, those intentions changed, and by December 2015, the date to release additional details had been pushed back to 2016.
Musk stated in January 2016 that he hoped to present the architecture for Mars missions using the next-generation SpaceX rocket and spacecraft during the 67th International Astronautical Congress conference in September 2016. In June 2016, Musk indicated that the first unscrewed MCT Mars journey would take place in 2022, with the first crewed MCT Mars flight following in 2024. Musk announced in mid-September 2016 that the MCT moniker would be dropped because the system would be able to “travel well beyond Mars,” and that a new name would be required. This was dubbed the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), a moniker that would only last a year.
On September 27, 2016, Musk revealed significant details of the design for the transport vehicles at the 67th annual meeting of the International Astronautical Congress. This included the size, construction material, number and type of engines, thrust, cargo and passenger payload capabilities, on-orbit propellant-tanker refills, representative transit times, etc. This also included little details of portions of the Mars-side and Earth-side architecture that SpaceX has planned to build to secure the mission. Furthermore, Musk championed a larger systemic vision, a vision for a bottom-up emergent order of other interested parties—whether companies, individuals, or governments—to use the new and radically lower-cost transportation infrastructure to build a sustainable human civilization on Mars, and potentially on many other locations all over the outer space. The system technology was explicitly envisioned in the 2016 iteration to eventually support exploration expeditions to other regions in the Solar System, including Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.
SpaceX announced ideas for an Interplanetary Transport System based on a smaller launch vehicle and spacecraft in July 2017. Since the ITS’s articulation in November 2016, the new system architecture has “developed quite a bit.” One of the main goals of the new architecture is to make the system suitable for large Earth-orbit and cislunar launches so that it can pay for itself in part through commercial spaceflight activities in the near-Earth space zone. The Super Heavy is planned to accomplish the Mars transportation goals while also launching satellites, servicing the International Space Station, carrying persons and goods to the Moon, and enabling ballistic passenger transit on Earth as a replacement for long-haul airline trips.
Even with the smaller 9-meter architecture, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell stated in early 2018 that she sees the programmed as merely the first step toward the company’s interplanetary and interstellar spaceflight ambitions.
How is it Being Funded? #
Much of the space transportation technology has been extensively developed and manufactured since 2016 and is being privately funded by SpaceX. The entire effort is only conceivable because of SpaceX’s mufti-faceted approach to lowering launch costs. SpaceX was spending “a few tens of millions of dollars yearly on development of the Mars transport idea, which equates to considerably under 5% of the company’s total expenses” as of October 2016, but expected that figure to climb to roughly $300 million per year by 2018. All of the work leading up to the first Mars launch was projected to cost “in the region of US$10 billion,” with SpaceX expecting to spend that much before earning any revenue from transportation. After SpaceX moved to the BFR’s small launch vehicle design in 2017, there was no public update on total costs before revenue in 2017. In September 2016, Musk stated that the full implementation of the Mars colonization plans would doubtlessly be financed both privately and publicly. Market demand will drive the speed of commercially available Mars transportation for both goods and persons, but it will also be bound by technical development and development financing.
What’s The Whole Idea Behind It? #
Musk wants to create a crewed outpost on Mars for a long-term presence on the surface, which he thinks will eventually turn into a self-sustaining colony. Successful colonization would entail many more economic actors—individuals, businesses, and governments—to allow the expansion of human presence on Mars over many decades.
Because the Starships are also reusable, Musk intends to refuel them first in low Earth orbit, then on the surface of Mars before returning to Earth. He plans to launch multiple Starships in the first phase to carry and assemble a propellant plant and begin constructing a base. From subsurface water ice and ambient CO2, the propellant factory would make methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen (O2).
Two robotic freight missions, the first of which may be dubbed “Heart of Gold,” were set to fly in 2022 with the goal of delivering a vast array of solar panels, mining equipment, as well as surface vehicles, food, and life support infrastructure. In addition, the mission design called for four more Starships to be launched in 2024: two robotic cargo flights and two crewed flights. They would be used to set up the propellant manufacturing facility and deploy the solar power stations and landing strips. They would also assemble the greenhouses. Other than the spaceship’s dry mass of 85 tonnes, each landing mass will have at least 100 tonnes of useful payload.
Because they will have life-support systems, the first temporary dwellings will be their own crewed Starships. However, wherever possible, the robotic Starship freight planes will be refuelled for their return trip to Earth. For a long-term base, it is recommended that the landing zone be less than 40 degrees latitude for optimal solar power production, a moderate temperature, and, most importantly, proximity to a vast sub-surface water ice deposit. Water ice must be of sufficient amount and quality. According to a preliminary SpaceX analysis, the propellant plant will need to mine 1 tonne of water ice every day and filter out its contaminants.
Based on a 2011 prototype test operation, the overall unit conversion rate is projected to be one metric tonne of O2/CH4 propellant per 17 megawatt-hours of solar energy input. The entire power required to manufacture a single full load of fuel for a SpaceX Starship is estimated to be around 16 gigawatt-hours (58 TJ) of locally produced Martian electricity. It would take just under one megawatt of continuous electric power to power one load for 26 months. The required area for a ground-based array of thin-film solar panels to produce sufficient power is estimated to be just over 56,200 square meters (605,000 sq. ft); with related equipment, the required mass is estimated to be well within the range of 100–150 metric tonnes (220,000–330,000 lb) for a single Starship Mars transport capability.
Alternatively, based on recent NASA research into fission reactors for deep space missions, sufficient fission-reactor-based electric power infrastructure might weigh between 210 and 216 metric tonnes (463,000 and 476,000 kg), requiring at least two Starships to transport. A Mars power system based on solar and vertical axis wind turbine architecture might weigh just over 3.15 metric tonnes (6,900 lb) to generate enough power.
Wrapping It Up #
The legal fine print for a Starling service, SpaceX’s system of space-borne satellites poised to offer internet access to Earth, and possibly Mars, eventually, contains a disturbing caveat.
The governing law states, “For services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.” In short, SpaceX will disregard all international regulations in favor of creating its own.
Related reading